BEFORE
I don’t know what love is.
Some say it has two forms. It can be roaring and passionate. It swallows you, consumes you, the other person a source of breathing. Like a violent flame that burns out in a single night.
Love can also be gentle, subtle. A wave washing into shore on a quiet afternoon. It settles over you like an ocean, till you become comfortable with the tide.
Sam has taken to calling me, my love. It started as a phrase of endearment, the kind he would whisper when we kissed in closets or under tables.
Kissing Sam is addicting. For someone who feels like an intruder in their own body, it is connection given an act. It makes me feel like I belong. Like I belong with him.
“My love, tell me things,” he says.
“What kind of things?” I ask.
“Anything. I want to hear you.”
“You taste like medicine,” I say, and he smiles, his teeth against my lips. It is, perhaps, my favorite feeling in the world.
Sam and I sleep in his bed. His legs tangle with mine as the dark rolls over the light. His head rests against my chest, drowsiness humming through him, the sheets tucked right up to his chin. Before he falls asleep, he traces my cheekbone with two fingers and asks, “What do you dream of, my love?”
“I don’t think I can dream,” I tell him.
“Everyone dreams,” he says. “I dream of you and me sailing across the ocean, and seeing the world.”
“The whole world?” I ask.
“Every corner of it.” The sheets ruffle as he shifts. “What do you dream of, my sweet Sam?”
I think, reveling in the feeling of Sam’s lips laying affections on my neck.
“I dream of this,” I say. Sam’s curiosity looks at me through his lashes. “I dream of you and I like this, together, tomorrow, and every tomorrow after that.”
“My love,” Sam says like it’s a statement of its own, a kiss that’s spoken rather than had. “All my tomorrows are yours.”
—
Sam stretches his neck back against the table, blowing out his breath as the doctors untie his gown. He lays horizontally, an object of examination. Sam has marks on his body, patches that rise above the skin. They crack and bleed in the cold. They become sore and raw when he bathes.
The men surrounding him talk to each other as if Sam isn’t there. They are his mechanics, and his engine needs tending to. Their hands run over his screws and bolts, picking out inconsistencies and mulling over how to remedy them.
I sit across the room. The doctors obstruct my view of him, like a kettle of white vultures. His face is all that’s visible, or rather, a disconnected version of it. Like I do, Sam attempts to look at himself from another point of view. The ceiling, the walls, some inanimate part of the room he used to give a soul.
Being naked, poked, and prodded at–none of it is strange to Sam. He’s undergone the routine since he was little. It’s a norm. But the shame never goes away, he says. It isn’t a logical thing to feel, yet he does. He feels exposed, leered at, vulnerable.
Working on a swallow, Sam eventually looks to me. I smile as if it could make any of this easier for him. Sam sticks his tongue out. I frown. He holds in a laugh, his lips twisting.
Once the exam is over, he sits up, and covers himself, muscles shaky.
I run to his side.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“Yes, my love,” he says. He kisses my nose. “I’m in the mood for a laugh, aren’t you? Let’s go play cards with Henry.”
“Okay,” I agree, helping him off the table and back into his clothes.
—
Children who experience illness can harden. It isn’t a response to pain, it’s a response to their life feeling stretched, thinned into a cycle. Memories blur into each other. A year in hospital can feel like ten. Maybe that’s why so many patients have the wisdom of an old man and the temper of a child.
Henry tells me that war is a lot like being sick. There’s a sense of will I make it out of this or won’t I. A lot of pain, a lot of boredom, and camaraderie among the hurt and bored.
Henry tells me he remembers the exact weight of his rifle and how odd it felt in his arms as he ran with a bouncing pack on his back. The air was nearly black, he says, full of smog so thick you could feel the tar in your lungs. The sirens and ammunition shot through his eardrums about as harshly as the blood stank.
The shadows he trudged through hold on to his memory like a bump in an otherwise flat road. He turns to me, his head limp on the pillow. Then, he asks if that’s what dying feels like. Running into the dark, not knowing whether light exists on the other side.
Henry faces his pipe again. He caresses the mouthpiece, looking across the room as if another cot sits beside his, a neighboring soul under the covers.
He speaks to the air, to that little ghost he keeps handy. He mumbles things I can’t quite make out, something about I remember, and almost, and I’ll be there soon.
I wait till Henry is asleep before I go see Sam. He’s reading a book, one of his hands in a fist as blood slowly drained from his arm and into a bag.
The patches on his skin sting against the cold air, cracking and bleeding, making him wince. A layer of gray and purple shrouded his eyes. I crawled into the bed with him and ask about his day.
He kisses my head and talks to me, drawing his sentences out, using more words than he has to, because he knows his voice calms me.
I ask Sam if he feels trapped by his body as Henry feels trapped in his.
Sam asks why I would think that. I tell him that he’s sick. He says you don’t have to be sick to feel stuck. I ask again if that’s how he feels. Sam says trapped isn’t the right word. He says he feels grounded because his mind can go anywhere it wants, but his body always brings him home.
He plays with my hair as I trace the healthy skin around the mounds of rawness.
He asks me if I’m okay.
I say I wish I could listen more without understanding less.
—
Henry dies a few days later.
We’re in the middle of a card game when a wave of tiresome hits him. Sam asks if he’s feeling alright and if he wants some water. Henry says he just needs a moment, a little nap before the next game. But when Sam and I leave the room, his heart stops beating. He tries to draw breath but can’t.
Nurses flood the room, Ella at the head. She flattens his cot, hurried codes and orders flying back and forth. Their loud, brutal efficiency is overshadowed by Henry’s gasping.
Sam tries to pull me out of the room.
“Wait,” I plead. Henry opens his eyes, turning his head on the pillow, a single arm reaching past his pipe. He tries to speak, no air to create words left in his throat. Then, his body goes limp. His eyes glaze over till nothing–no one–exists behind them.
“Wait–”
“You don’t have to see this,” Sam whispers, pushing me down the hall. There isn’t time to calm me down, so he opens the door to the old supply closet and leads me in.
“He was doing so much better,” I whisper, walking backward, trying not to replay the scene in my head.
“I know. I know, it’s not fair,” Sam says, hugging me tight, but I know he’s crying too. “It’ll be okay. It’ll be fine.” His breath huffs as he speaks, the heat blowing on my hair, his voice muffled. “It’ll be okay. Don’t lose hope.”
“He was so strong,” I say. “Why did he die?”
“I don’t know,” Sam whispers. “I don’t know, my love.”
“He just wanted to be with his friend.”
“What?”
“Henry,” I say, my chest all tight. “When he lost his leg in the war, his friend died next to him. He cried. He screamed. He just wanted to be with him.”
“He told you that?”
“No.” I shake my head, and the blood of that day may as well be spilled on the floor. I can smell it, feel it. “No, I saw it.”
“My love, Henry lost his leg over sixty years ago,” Sam says. “You wouldn’t have been born yet.”
My existence is difficult to phrase and even harder to explain. No one has ever questioned it. No one has ever wondered. As such, when Sam’s confused gaze meets mine, I’m not sure how to say it.
“I–” I swallow. “I am not like the other broken things you know.”
Sam’s arms fall slowly, his hands settling on my wrists, the scar he bears brushing against my skin. He frowns, confused.
“I don’t understand.”
“This place,” I say, “This is where I belong. This is who I am.” I bring my hands up to Sam’s face, tracing the curvature, the way it’s changed yet stayed the same in so many ways.
“I was so lonely,” I say like I’m apologizing. “I wanted to know why the people I’m meant to protect always slip through my fingers.” I want to cry. I want to cry and bring Henry and his friend both back. I want them to hug like Sam, and I hug and smoke their pipes and live together in that little cabin by the river.
I stutter over a sob. “Why do people have to die?”
Sam doesn’t know what to say. He’s always been full of teachings ever since he was little, but this has always been my one search for a reason despite the fact that I condemn it.
And Sam has no answer.
He bites down, and a frustrated noise spit between his teeth. He holds onto my wrists, his forehead against mine.
“We can leave,” he says, a little whisper behind it.
I blink. “What?”
“We can get away from all this,” he says. “All this sadness and death. We can get away from this place so barren of story and adventure.”
“Sam–”
“We’ll take vials of my medicine. I’ll be careful. I can get a job. I’ll take care of us,” he whispers, urgency in his voice like he’s ready to run and pull me with him like we’re just children in a park. “We can go see the world, my love. We can experience all the things we never got to feel. We can finally be free and watch the sunrise without glass in the way.”
Everything is moving so fast. Sam’s grip is iron. His words are fluid, drowning me. I feel like air stuck underwater.
“I can’t,” I whisper.
“Yes, you can,” Sam says. “I know it’s scary, but we’ll have each other and–”
“I can’t leave, Sam.” I slide out of his hold, walking backward till we’re disconnected. “Not forever,” I say, dragging my sleeve across my mouth as if my words could take up less space if I muffled them. “Not like you want me to.”
“What do you mean, not forever?” Sam asks, all softness evaporated.
“I–”
“Don’t you want to be with me?” Not a question. An accusation. A reach for a lifeline, like Henry searching for his ghost. “Don’t you love me?”
Sam and I stare at one another, the closet so dimly lit I can only make out his face and his outline. The longer I take to answer, the more he tenses.
I want him to be happy.
I want him to be happy with me.
I want him, and he wants the world.
So for the first time, I’m not sure that I’m enough.
Sam’s body sags slowly. The tears that belonged to Henry dry. He wipes them from his cheeks, his jaw flexed. He looks as he does when he is being examined, vulnerable, shame behind the echo of his breaths.
He rubs his face up and down. Then, a hardness I don’t know takes to him, like a knight putting up a shield.
“Alright,” he whispers. He turns around, reaching for the doorknob.
“Sam?” I call. “Sam, don’t leave, please,” I beg. I try to grab the back of his shirt, but he’s already opened the door and shut it behind him. “Sam!”
The room goes completely dark.
Like a smog-ridden battleground.
I wonder, as I cry, if Henry got an answer to his question. I wonder if he ran through the black and came out on the other side. I wonder if, in the light, his friend was waiting for him, smoking a pipe, smiling with open arms.
And then I wonder if Henry is still running. I wonder if he will run through the dark only to learn there is nothing on the other side.
